Property Management
Updated 1-7-2008Your customers, your staff, your bottom line: These are your priorities during the regular 8-5 work week. But, what happens during off-hours, the other 75% of the time that intense management is not available? During these times, it is critical that you offer your customers and employees the same quality service they obtain when dealing directly with your front-office staff. That quality answering service is here, with Centratel!
In 2005, after over 20 years in business, we coined ourselves the “highest quality telephone answering service in the United States.” It’s a bold statement but not over the top: If the quality of service is not the best you'll find anywhere, it's very close. Tangible evidence of this claim is that our most recent (October through December 2007) "customer reported error rate" was one error for every 13,900 message transactions. What better indicator of quality than current customers' direct feedback and continued patronage?
We invite you to review testimonials from our current clients.
Personal and property liability risks are inherent to property management, so after-hours calls must be handled efficiently, immediately and with great care. Our various relay protocols, built on 23 years of emergency dispatch for the medical profession, have a major commonality: It is critical that your incoming calls be handled exactly as described in the 1-2-3 step property management telephone answering service relay method that has been specially designed for your company. The essential element in the answering service relay protocol is that the urgent message is delivered, quickly and efficiently! The new property management client is carefully interviewed by Centratel's new-account specialists to determine what exactly constitutes an emergency and how to relay the information to on-call personnel.
Absolutely dependable, it is the Centratel Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) job to carefully follow relay instructions to find a balance between needlessly disturbing your on-call personnel and efficiently connecting him or her to tenants or owners who truly need immediate assistance. Once the property management answering service relay protocol has been established for your account, it is followed tenaciously by the TSR unless we have been given real-time instructions otherwise. As illustrated in an answering service case study, we have developed 1-2-3 step relay answering service procedures to provide nearly zero-defect call screening/dispatching processes.
Centratel is poles apart from the traditional telephone answering service. For us, it is about people dealing with people and not simply about our customers employing our answering service. We provide the next level of professionalism and value.
Centratel's capabilities are expansive. Do you have multiple property management offices? We will seamlessly mesh all your operations, providing a blanket on-call message delivery protocol or creating individual message delivery scenarios for each office. Hard-copy call activity backup can be provided to headquarters and/or to each individual office.
Centratel Quality: Quality of message taking and message delivery is, of course, subjective but Centratel's systematic protocols have developed directly as a result of handling emergencies for our many medical clients. What is true for medical urgencies is also true for any non-medical urgency. The transaction with the caller must be professional, accuracy must be zero-defect, and the process of taking the information and delivering it must be concise, fast and efficient. All this must be accomplished by TSR’s who perform in exactly the way you expect your front office personnel to perform: they are personable, informed, positive and not rushed.
We are the face of your property management company when you're not there. Your non-emergency calls must also be handled quickly, professionally and in a friendly way. Every call counts!
Your office personnel have a direct connection to a specific Customer Service Representative (CSR). Our customer service department is organized so that you will have one person assigned to your account who handles all client issues directly with the TSR staff. Your Customer Service Representative will know your people personally and understand your property management telepphone answering service account intimately. Indirectly becoming a part of the property management office staff, your CSR is friendly, professional and dependable. After-hours, and in the absence of your assigned CSR, a skilled on-site Operations Supervisor will be immediately available to answer questions or handle unusual answering service or call center situations.
All calls are digitally recorded, providing a solid record of any conversation between our TSR and your caller. This is a critical element in determining liability issues--experience has shown that over 90% of client complaints are based upon caller misunderstandings or errors, and not based on TSR error.
Centratel generates hard-copy backups of all transactions. For routine messages, there is a variety of delivery options available including voice mail, fax, cellular text and Email. If you use our daytime answering service, messages can be delivered one at a time as they are taken, or in batches. All elements of every after-hours on-call contact are batched hard-copy to the office each morning. We can provide full archiving of answered messages for a period of three years.
At Centratel our people make the difference. Applicants for the TSR position undergo an intensive interviewing/testing process. We have a zero-tolerance policy regarding substance abuse: Drug testing is part of the interview process, and frequent random testing occurs with all answering service and administrative staff. Training is incessant and rigorous; our expectations are high. In turn, our TSR staff enjoys wages and benefits in the top 2% of all telephone answering services nationally as they perform in a work environment that is both calm and invigorating. We don't hire part-time answering service staff; Centratel TSR's earn a living wage and consider their positions as careers. We break the stereotype of telephone answering service industry in which operations personnel are too often under-paid and overworked. At Centratel, we work in the opposite direction, fully acknowledging that the key element in a superb answering service message relay lies with the people who handle the calls. And unlike the majority of answering services that discourage clients’ contact with operations personnel, we invite you to personally inspect our physical operation in Bend, Oregon and meet the people who actually handle your calls.
At Centratel our Telephone Service Representatives use the absolute latest and most dependable 100% digital call center processing equipment available. Ours is a complex business: all primary systems are redundant and equipment backup systems are readily available. We employ a highly skilled, certified technical staff that is available 24/7/365. Our full-time CMSE engineer is available 24/7 to handle unexpected technical problems. There is too much "on the line" to offer anything less!
And, we do it all at a reasonable price! Almost needless to say, for the property manager, the liabilities associated with poor after-hours message relay can far exceed the monthly costs of a reliable telephone answering service.
To apply for service, go to our Price Quote page.
